Literary Ventures: Acre Books

For our latest installment of Literary Ventures, our new column that highlights new presses, magazines, literary organizations, and other literary adventures, we spoke with Nicola Mason, editor of the new press, Acre Books, born out of The Cincinnati Review.

Tell us about Acre Books.

Acre Books is the newly established book-publishing arm of The Cincinnati Review. We plan to fill our lists with high-caliber poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, and hybrid forms. The brilliant Danielle Cadena Deulen is our poetry and nonfiction editor, I’m the fiction editor, and we have a designer nonpareil in Barbara Neely Bourgoyne.

What inspired you to move from managing Cincinnati Review to creating a small press?

It seemed like a logical leap. CR has only been around since 2003, but despite its youth, we’ve developed a reputation for being a magazine that is well and truly read. Over the years, our subscription and submission numbers just kept mounting. Not only were pieces from CR’s pages getting regularly tapped for inclusion in prize anthologies (including Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Anthology), the authors of those pieces–many of them young writers with no “names” to speak of–were winning first-book prizes. Agents began subscribing to CR and asking us to put them in touch with various contributors. I started thinking that we should capitalize on our own strengths, publish not only single pieces by the wonderful writers we were discovering through our submission pool, but their books as well. In other words, that we should rely on our reputation and further develop the relationships we struck up with these undeniable talents—people the editors of Southern Review used to call (when I started out there years ago) “comers.”

What can we expect from Acre in its first year?

Our premiere publication is out now! It’s a themed anthology titled A Very Angry Baby. The work included—from twenty contributors—runs the gamut in form, setting, tone, and angry-baby-induced trauma. Not all the babies are young, not all are small, not all are real, not all are human. But there’s an emotional center there, in the idea. An angry baby really can’t be ignored. Well, it can . . . but there are consequences. I rustled up some truly inspiring work both from writers who are well established and from those who have yet to crash the scene. Contributors include Julianna Baggott, Brock Clarke, Rebecca Hazelton, Andrew Hudgins, Erin McGraw, Jamie Quatro, and Josh Russell. All the pieces but one are unpublished, and a number of them were written specifically for the anthology. Though the volume is rather thin—130 pages—the content feels really full. Rich. Not to mention . . . fun. We even created a trailer for our YouTube channel. Check it out here.

The anthology will be Acre’s only spring offering, but we plan to bring out three or four books for the fall season. Our hope is to release one title per month starting in August.